Many industrial waste products such as pigskin, fish scale, and avian eggshell membranes are a source of valuable bioactive materials, including collagen, that have widespread applications in medical, health and cosmetic industries. To date, a major drawback to their use has been the difficulty in solubilizing these proteinaceous starting materials in a sufficiently stable and active pure form at an industrial scale so that high yield is achieved in an economic manner.
For example, solubilization of eggshell membranes has proven technically difficult. Recent processes to solubilize eggshell membranes include the use of mercaptopropionic acid, various extraction agents, or enzymes, such as peptidases, trypsin, and collagenases; however, problems have been associated with these procedures. The amount of protein solubilized from the starting material by these processes is low, the techniques are not cost-effective, and often the recovered protein components do not maintain their native activity. Therefore an inexpensive process for solubilizing eggshell membranes and other sources of proteinaceous materials while maintaining both yield, purity and activity of the solubilized protein is needed, particularly one suited for commercial scale implementation.